Today, I'm presenting you a dark nebula, which I personally found quite challenging to process. It's LDN 1251 in the constellation Cepheus. It was a rather spontaneous decision to capture this target as I had already started imaging another object but the latter would be more suitable to address in about 4 to 8 weeks from now.

The central object is the aforementioned LDN 1251 which is located approximately 350 pc from Earth (source: SIMBAD). The shape of the nebula appears to me like a whale. Coincidentally, to the East of the nebula, we can see galaxy UGC12160/PGC69472, that appears to be the next meal of the whale. The galaxy is listed with about 25 Mpc distance and of Type Sc. It's fairly small with a diameter of about 10 kpc. Since our line of sight crosses the interstellar medium of LDN 1251, the galaxy's color doesn't show the more commonly expected bluish tone.
Another galaxy, "covered" by the interstellar medium is PGC166755 at a distance of 31-44 Mpc (source: SIMBAD).

If you spend a bit more time at the image, you'll notice the red star to the East (left) edge of the frame. Its catalogued as TYC 4488-271-1 (that's the shortest designation I could find, Gaia data is longer). It's not just pretty red due to my processing but its B-V is actually 2,17 and so not very far away from Garnet Star with a B-V of 2,35.

As I said in the intro, I found the processing not easy. In the first run, I had only collected half of this data and it quickly proved that two things are very important here: no light pollution (that's a new moon target for sure) and more data.
The challenge here is to assess how much of a gradient is present. And if one has an idea of what the gradient might look like, it's a challenge to build a background model as the placement of measurement probes is very difficult since the nebulosity is virtually everywhere. I think in the end, I could handle it and make a decent picture out of it.

Björn